[gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On 2009-01-24, Steven Lembark lemb...@wrkhors.com wrote: OK folks, all have a seat please. I ran a full blown KDE on a 133Mhz machine with 256Mbs of ram. A friend if mine played Solitaire on it and it worked well. It even had sound on it. I started running fvwm on a 486 w/ 16MB of core and a pair of 20MB disk drives (one RLL one MFM). :) That sounds like my first linux setup, except I started with 8MB of RAM and both of the 20MB drives were MFM ST506-style drives. RLL was leading edge back then. I remember running SunOS and X on 68000 machines with 4MB of RAM. Face it: we've all become addicted to amounts of RAM that didn't even exist on the planet 25 years ago, let alone disk Yup. When I first started running Linux The only people who talked about a gigbyte of RAM worked at places like DEC setting up large clusters of machines that had resources a mere mortal couldn't even dream of. -- Grant
[gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On 2009-01-20, Grant Edwards gra...@visi.com wrote: On 2009-01-20, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: I believe he means that generally speaking, trying to build OO from source on a low-end (and especially low RAM) machine is ill-advised and can often be the cause of build failures as OO is well known to require a lot of RAM and hdd space while it compiles. I know it needs 5gb+ of tmpdir space, but compiling it with 256mb may be futile :) It's been chugging away for about 30 hours now, so we'll see. :) For the morbidly curious, he OOo emerge finished succesfully after 34.77 hours. The machine has 256MB of RAM (PC133 SDRAM) with 1GB of swap: pavilion log # cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 6 model name : Celeron (Mendocino) stepping: 5 cpu MHz : 434.314 cache size : 128 KB fdiv_bug: no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug: no coma_bug: no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr bogomips: 868.62 clflush size: 32 power management: I don't yet know if OOo actually works (the machine is headless and keyboardless at the moment). -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! This MUST be a good at party -- My RIB CAGE is visi.combeing painfully pressed up against someone's MARTINI!!
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
Am Dienstag, den 20.01.2009, 19:37 + schrieb Grant Edwards: On 2009-01-20, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:32:02 -0600, Paul Hartman wrote: I know it needs 5gb+ of tmpdir space, but compiling it with 256mb may be futile :) Not if he's got plenty of swap, it'll just run even slower. Expect a new Debian release before OOo finishes building :) I've got 256MB of RAM plus 1GB of swap space. I'm sort of torturing the poor machine -- in addition to the OOo build, I'm emerging some other miscellaneous stuff (sdl-mixer at the moment). With the two emerge jobs running, there is 32MB of swap is in-use (unchanged for several minutes). That's not bad considering that the OOo build's cc1plus process RSS climbs up to 100+ MB at times. I once got OOos binaries to be _a_bit_ smaller by manually patching the ebuild to allow -Os. But it turned out, that it wasn't worth it, because the next update I had to recompile the hole thing for hours and hours again, and what I had won was to little to be worth the hassle. If -Os worked depended on both the OOo version and the GCC version... and there goes another compile for hours and hours... Was an interesting experience, but not worth it in the long run. Bye, Daniel -- PGP key @ http://pgpkeys.pca.dfn.de/pks/lookup?search=0xBB9D4887op=get # gpg --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net 0xBB9D4887 signature.asc Description: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil
[gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On 2009-01-20, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: My biggest suggestion for a slow machine is: distcc I'm not too concerned about build times for large packages. The machine isn't going to be connect to a network and once it's in a working state won't be doing much emerging. Secondly, I've never had much luck with distcc. When I last tried it (admittedly a couple years ago), I immediately started tripping over packages that wouldn't build using distcc. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! Are you still an at ALCOHOLIC? visi.com
[gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On 2009-01-20, Alejandro elcorreode...@gmail.com wrote: installing ooo from source is unsupport How is this? Maybe you missundertand i think he run emerge openoffice and not openoffice-bin Yes, that's what I meant. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! Am I in Milwaukee? at visi.com
[gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On 2009-01-20, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: I believe he means that generally speaking, trying to build OO from source on a low-end (and especially low RAM) machine is ill-advised and can often be the cause of build failures as OO is well known to require a lot of RAM and hdd space while it compiles. I know it needs 5gb+ of tmpdir space, but compiling it with 256mb may be futile :) It's been chugging away for about 30 hours now, so we'll see. :) -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! Are we laid back yet? at visi.com
[gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On 2009-01-20, s3b4sm4gr1 sebasma...@gmail.com wrote: You should consider using LXDE as DE, which is designed for low memory and CPU usage... I'll take alook at LXDE. I use XFCE on all my other machines, so I was hoping to get by with in on this machine (which is primarily for use by somebody else). I'm currently using it on a Celeron Coppermine @ 600Mhz with 256 of PC133 RAM and it goes fine, among with abiword, gnumeric and claws-mail for the office work, consonance for music playing, I'll have to take a look at consonance as well. I generally just use mplayer running in a small terminal window, but that's probably not going to pass muster for anybody else. and pidgin and conspire for Instant Messaging... -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! I don't understand at the HUMOUR of the THREE visi.comSTOOGES!!
[gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On 2009-01-20, Dirk Heinrichs dirk.heinri...@online.de wrote: Don't know if this is possible with portage, I switched to paludis a long time ago. However, with paludis, one can setup several environments, each with a different set of USE flags, CFLAGS, etc., where each will be installed into a different root directory. Inside this root directory, everything looks like a normal install. So you could mount the complete filesystem tree of the slow machine on a faster one (via NFS), compile everything on the fast machine and let it install to /root_of_slow_box. Thanks, that's an interesting option. Next time I go through this exercise I'll give it a try. I chose XFCE for the desktop along with both Abiword and OpenOffice. I probably should have installed OOo from a binary package, but I decided to build it just to see how long it would take (so far it's at about 26 hours and counting). Hehe, I once did a Linux from Scratch install on my Amiga. Compiling GCC took ages to complete, didn't even dare to think about something like OOo. I always use FVWM on low power machines. It's quite fast and, with the crystal theme, looks very nice. I used fvwm (and fvwm2) for many years (starting with a 25MHz 80486 with 8MB of RAM) before switching to XFCE 5-6 years ago. About 10 years ago I configured a couple manufacturing test stations with fvwm95 so that they would be comfortable for people who normally used MS Windows. I think a couple of the users never even realized it was Linux. There was something in particular that prompted my change from fvwm2 to XFCE, but I can't remember what it was... -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! RHAPSODY in Glue! at visi.com
[gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On 2009-01-20, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:32:02 -0600, Paul Hartman wrote: I know it needs 5gb+ of tmpdir space, but compiling it with 256mb may be futile :) Not if he's got plenty of swap, it'll just run even slower. Expect a new Debian release before OOo finishes building :) I've got 256MB of RAM plus 1GB of swap space. I'm sort of torturing the poor machine -- in addition to the OOo build, I'm emerging some other miscellaneous stuff (sdl-mixer at the moment). With the two emerge jobs running, there is 32MB of swap is in-use (unchanged for several minutes). That's not bad considering that the OOo build's cc1plus process RSS climbs up to 100+ MB at times. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! On the road, ZIPPY at is a pinhead without a visi.compurpose, but never without a POINT.
[gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On 2009-01-21, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: It's funny, I have read a lot of people complain that the binary is the same way but compiling from source works. Interesting. The reason I was told I should compile my own is because it was more stable than the binary. The first time I tried installing OOo, I did the binary install. It wouldn't run, so since then I've always built it. How do you figure that OOo from source is not supported? I've been wondering that as well. I checked the package database and the OOo ebuild is marked as stable for x86. In my book, that's supported. Of course that's not be the same thing as practical for some machines (I believe my OOo emerge just passed hour 31). It would be interesting to know how much further it's go to go, but as long as it's done in a week or so that'll be good enough. I remember building binutils, gcc, X11, emacs, and so on from sources on a 25MHz 68000 with 4MB of RAM -- that took some patience as well. -- Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 8:18 PM, Grant Edwards gra...@visi.com wrote: On 2009-01-21, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: It's funny, I have read a lot of people complain that the binary is the same way but compiling from source works. Interesting. The reason I was told I should compile my own is because it was more stable than the binary. The first time I tried installing OOo, I did the binary install. It wouldn't run, so since then I've always built it. How do you figure that OOo from source is not supported? I've been wondering that as well. I checked the package database and the OOo ebuild is marked as stable for x86. In my book, that's supported. Of course that's not be the same thing as practical for some machines (I believe my OOo emerge just passed hour 31). It would be interesting to know how much further it's go to go, but as long as it's done in a week or so that'll be good enough. I remember building binutils, gcc, X11, emacs, and so on from sources on a 25MHz 68000 with 4MB of RAM -- that took some patience as well. Latest OOo 3.0 source compile for me took 1hr 34 minutes on my dual-core E6600 overclocked to 3ghz with 8 gigs of RAM :P i don't know what that translates to in your machine speed. I have 6000 bogomips for each core according to /proc/cpuinfo (I know it's not a benchmark) Paul
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:48:00 pm Grant Edwards wrote: snip Of course that's not be the same thing as practical for some machines (I believe my OOo emerge just passed hour 31). It would be interesting to know how much further it's go to go, but as long as it's done in a week or so that'll be good enough. I remember building binutils, gcc, X11, emacs, and so on from sources on a 25MHz 68000 with 4MB of RAM -- that took some patience as well. Have a look at the 'genlop' package.
[gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On 2009-01-21, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: (I believe my OOo emerge just passed hour 31). It would be interesting to know how much further it's got to go Latest OOo 3.0 source compile for me took 1hr 34 minutes on my dual-core E6600 overclocked to 3ghz with 8 gigs of RAM :P I'm not sure I can extrapolate based on that. :) I do remember that OOo 2 used to build overnight on a 650MHz laptop I had, so I'm guessing it should be done soon (in the next 10-20 hours). -- Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Tips/Tricks for Gentoo on low-spec computer?
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 9:49 PM, Grant Edwards gra...@visi.com wrote: On 2009-01-21, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: (I believe my OOo emerge just passed hour 31). It would be interesting to know how much further it's got to go Latest OOo 3.0 source compile for me took 1hr 34 minutes on my dual-core E6600 overclocked to 3ghz with 8 gigs of RAM :P I'm not sure I can extrapolate based on that. :) I do remember that OOo 2 used to build overnight on a 650MHz laptop I had, so I'm guessing it should be done soon (in the next 10-20 hours). Well the good news is that OOo 3 takes MUCH less time to compile than 2.x My last compile of OOo 2.4.1 on this same box took 2 hours 43 minutes... 75% slower than OOo 3.0. Let us know when it is done :) It can be used as a benchmark to determine how long other packages may take on that machine. Paul
